The Path to Self-Knowledge

THE PATH TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.
(I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me.)

Terence, 2nd century BC

[EXTRACT FROM NICHOLAS HUMPHREY, “CONSCIOUSNESS REGAINED”, OUP 1983]

6

JOINING THE CLUB

For a natural psychologist, the idea of fear will originate when he himself feels fear, the idea of love when he himself feels love . . . But these feelings will not occur to any person unconditionally. It may be true, as I've argued in the preceding essays, that reflexive consciousness is the source of the psychological concepts in terms of which ordinary people think about behaviour. But for each of us the history of what has happened in our consciousness must depend on our own experience in the outside world. The range of psychological concepts which we can know about through introspection will therefore be, at best, only as broad as our experience is wide. It follows that, in so far as this is the way that people do psychology, any one person's understanding of human behaviour must be more or less constrained by what he himself has been through.

This is an important conclusion. It may however strike you as profoundly unsurprising. Few people - and few academic psychologists, whatever their persuasion — would dispute that for someone to have lived through a particular experience should make him a better judge of how any human being is likely to react in comparable circumstances. The conclusion would surely be the same if the 'someone' were, instead of a 'natural psychologist' of the kind I've pictured, a thoroughgoing behaviourist — if his understanding of behaviour were based wholly on external observation without the aid of introspection. The grounds for drawing the conclusion would in the latter case be different: the natural psychologist benefits from having lived through an experience because — among other things — it gives him first-hand knowledge of what it feels like, whereas the behaviourist benefits simply from being able to observe how in those circumstances a typical human being (himself!) behaves. But, either way, personal experience may be expected to prove an invaluable aid to doing psychology.

Let us however examine the case of the behaviourist a bit more closely. We must suppose that, since he denies himself the privilege of introspection, all he gets out of personal experience is the chance to observe what he himself does, how things turn out for him: his information can amount to little more than he would get from watching his own body on a television screen. But, that being so, it makes no substantial difference that the body he is observing is his own body — it might just as well be someone else's. Gilbert Ryle put it plainly. The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same . . . John Doe's ways of finding out about John Doe are the same as John Doe's ways of finding out about Richard Roe.'1

The behaviourist, then, should be able to learn as much (and as little) about human behaviour by being the audience to someone else's performance as by being the actor himself. The natural psychologist, however, has no such choice: he has himself to be on stage if he is to have access to the privileged information which conscious reflection on his own performance gives him; though he too may learn something from observing others, he cannot thereby learn all there is to learn.

So we come to a question of fact. Is personal experience necessary — and not merely sufficient — to ordinary people's understanding of behaviour? Does insight enlarge the mind in a way that outward-looking observation never could do?

My argument was based before largely on an appeal to a priori plausibility. But now that the role of personal experience has been called in question, the two rival accounts of how people do psychology come into open conflict over an issue which ought to be empirically resolvable. It should surely be possible to determine whether in the real world people learn more about psychology from observing themselves than they do — or ever could — from observing others.

Let me at once disillusion you: so far as I know there are neither experimental nor clinical studies which bear directly on this issue. That is not to say that the question is unanswerable; indeed 1 think the answer is already widely known. But the evidence for it lies not in the scientific literature but in the fund of our everyday beliefs and practices. Common opinion, common knowledge and common practice provide here as persuasive an authority as any; and the answer they hand down is that personal experience is of peculiar importance to people's education as psychologists.

Since part of my ground for asserting this to be the answer is that all ordinary people already believe it to be true, I do not intend to make heavy weather of convincing you. I shall simply give some examples, illustrating the way in which differences in personal experience may affect one person's understanding of another's behaviour. But my main purpose in these chapters is to explore a consequent question. How, if personal experience is so important, do people make sure that they get it — in the right way, at the right time, and of the right kind?

Because most people do, in the end, contrive to extend their own experience to a remarkable (yet often unremarked) degree, examples of differences in personal experience are not all that easy to come by. More often than not we lack the relevant 'controls' — individuals for whom we can be sure that the particular experience is missing. But one area where this problem is minimal is that of sexual experience.

Although the experience of sexual intercourse is not of course an all-or-nothing thing, it is near enough all-or-nothing for the world at large to draw a clear distinction between sexual initiates and virgins. Moreover, here as in few other areas a person's lack of experience may be publicly vouched for — for example by their bodily immaturity or by their dress. The absence of breasts or of beard, the wearing of a nun's habit or a monk's, are fairly sure signs of sexual inexperience.

Now, the gap in these virgins' personal experience ought, so my argument tells us, to leave a deep gap in their understanding of sexual behaviour, a gap which could not in principle be filled by the most assiduous reading of a sex manual or the most dedicated scientific observation of the behaviour of loving couples in the park. Is that the case? Certainly common wisdom has it so. No one would go for advice on the psychology of sex to a child who has not yet reached puberty; and the advice of the celibate Roman Catholic clergy on marital and sexual matters, though it is sometimes sought, frequently proves foolish and insensitive. But since no one does seek the advice of children and since what the clergy have to say remains for the most part a secret of the confessional, we have as usual no hard data based upon experimental tests.

Let us then be the subjects of a test ourselves. Consider these verses upon sexual love, in Dryden's translation from Book IV of Lucretius:

[Now] when the Youthful pair more clossely joyn,
When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine
Just in the raging foam of full desire,
When both press on, both murmur, both expire,
They gripe, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart,
As each wou'd force their way to t'others heart:
In vain; they only cruze about the coast,
For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost:
As sure they strive to be, when both engage,
In that tumultuous momentary rage,
So 'tangled in the Nets of Love they lie,
Till Man dissolves in that excess of joy.
Then, when the gather'd bag has burst its way,
And ebbing tydes the slacken'd nerves betray,
A pause ensues; and Nature nods a while,
Till with recruited rage new Spirits boil;
And then the same vain violence returns,
With flames renew'd th'erected furnace burns.
Agen they in each other wou'd be lost,
But still by adamantine bars are crost;
All ways they try, successeless all they prove,
To cure the secret sore of lingring love.

W. B. Yeats called these lines 'the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written'.- A description — yes, a depiction even. At one level it is pure behaviourism: Dryden the detached observer coolly painting in words a picture of what lovers do. But if that was all there was to it the poem would hardly deserve to be so celebrated, and especially not by Yeats. Sexual initiates should not after all need a poet to tell them what lovers look like in bed, and virgins, though they may find the information intriguing, might learn still more from a visit to the modern cinema.

But Dryden does not simply tell us what the lovers looked like. On another level his poem attempts to convey something to which the behaviourist must necessarily be blind, something which could never be achieved with pictures, the sense of what the lovers felt — a frustrated longing to lose their selfhood in each other. For Yeats the true purpose of the poem was to illustrate the difficulty of two becoming a unity: 'The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.'

To this deeper level of meaning, who responds? What does someone who has never himself experienced loneliness in the arms of a sexual partner make of Dryden's dry commentary on the lovers' oceanic exploits? How is the uninitiated to comprehend 'the secret sore of lingring love'? The words, if they register at all, may seem to him mere cynicism; worse, cynicism inspired by envy of another's obvious pleasure. Cynicism in a way they are, but never mere. To the reader, empowered by bis or her personal experience to understand them, Dryden's remarks are addressed as a salutary reminder and as an omen. On that 'secret sore' past relationships have foundered, and future ones will. The poem, like all good poetry, depends for its effect on lighting a taper in the reader's memory. But it cannot illuminate what is not there.

It may seem absurdly scientistic to call Dryden an introspective psychologist, more so still to say that when he refers, obliquely or directly, to the lovers' private feelings he is attempting to set up an explanatory model of their actions. But that, in the end, is what he is and what he does; and he does so through reference to concepts which, because of people's differing experience, cannot be universally intelligible. His poem is, for sure, a brilliant description of publicly observable behaviour, and as such is available to anyone; but it also presents a psychological hypothesis about the lovers' state of mind in a language which speaks only to those in whom the relevant concepts have been planted by their own experience. It takes a thief to catch a thief — and an intimate of his own consciousness to catch the intimations of consciousness in others.

I have stressed the exceptions, yet in reality sexual intercourse is an area of behaviour where few adult men and women are total strangers. Most will have understood that poem, and more still will understand the example I give next. Here, in a passage from the Song of Solomon, is a palliative to the Dryden, an evocation of a gentler, more generous phase of loving where the 'tragedy' — if it is to come — is as yet unrecognised. The voice is a man's; then his woman answers him.

'A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits' . . . 'Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits ... I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove . . . My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.'

If these verses stir memories of your own past feelings for a sexual partner, spare a thought for those less privileged who even now may be labouring with some immaculate misconception of the horticultural images. Spare a thought for the Church Fathers who in the Authorised Version of the Bible summarised this passage of the Song: 'Christ setteth forth the graces of the church; the church prayeth to be made fit for his presence.' Like that strangely-labelled door which confronted Steppenwolf in Hermann Hesse's novel, the imagery here is ultimately 'Not for everybody'. The key, once more, lies with our own experience. While the majority of us may be fortunate enough to enter into the meaning of the verses, none the less each of us enters alone and with a key which he himself has cut.

So we understand — most of us — these poems, and more importantly we understand the behaviour of real lovers, because, to put it unromantically again, we have most of us acquired through personal experience the concepts which allow us to model human sexual behaviour. Yet if the commonality of sexual experience brings the natural psychology of sex within range of the majority of ordinary people, by the same token the rarity of certain kinds of experience must have the majority, in other areas, psychologically inept. Let me turn to an area which most of us do not understand, namely the behaviour of people who are ill.

Among the Ndembu of Zambia curative rituals for those who are troubled with sickness or misfortune are performed by 'doctors' at great public gatherings. These doctors' chief qualification for their role is that they themselves should previously have suffered and been cured: 'Doctors or diviners reply to the question "How did you learn your job?" by the words "I started by being sick myself"." The expectation that doctor and patient shall have shared the same experience is dramatically expressed in certain less common rituals where 'the doctor gives medicine to himself as well as to the patient and both give way to paroxysms of quivering, very unpleasant to behold'.

In our own society we do not insist that our doctors shall have been sick themselves. True, we should regard with suspicion a doctor who had never himself had a headache, never vomited or had a fever. Still, we confidently allow our bones to be set, stomach ulcers to be excised or insomnia suppressed by doctors who have never suffered those particular disorders. We expect, it seems, no more insight from a doctor into sickness than we expect insight from a policeman into what it feels like to be burgled or from a fireman into what it feels like to have one's home go up in flames.

We expect no more and get no more. Western medicine is, in reputation and in fact, a medicine of the body rather than the person. As often as not the patient is discharged from the clinic with a remedy for his bodily symptoms but with little advice given to him, or to his family, on how to cope with the -abnormal' behaviour which sickness so frequently entails. Someone who is sick is, after all, likely to behave in ways which in a healthy person would seem totally bizarre. A man with back pain, for example, will not only walk and stand most strangely, but he may desert his work, grumble all the time, and stop sleeping with his wife; likewise the sufferer from migraine, deafness, constipation or lung cancer will, each according to his illness, show some form of behavioural eccentricity.

Animals have been reported to react to the illness of another member of their species with outright aggression. People do not generally demonstrate so blatantly their lack of fellow-feeling for the sick, yet precious few show real psychological understanding. If my thesis is right it could hardly be otherwise: for few, whether doctors or laymen, are qualified by their own experience in this area to be natural psychologists. Most sorts of illness are, by definition, rare. They are not like sex; most of us have no personal experience of them. When we are confronted, say, by a person with migraine, those of us who have never ourselves known migraine are conceptual virgins, unable to imagine the peculiar fear, the auras, the pain and depression, the feelings which the patient himself considers to be the cause — and the explanation — of his own untypical behaviour.

In those circumstances where should — where does - the patient turn? To fellow-sufferers if he can find them. People with back pain, for example, will seek out and talk to others who have experienced back pain: witness Professor Steven Rose, who tells how, having been dismissed by his doctor with a prescription for painkillers and bed-rest, he went on to discover through encounters with a series of strangers the 'subjectivity of collective back pain wisdom and its resultant companionship'/ In a parallel search for sympathy (meaning not merely condolence but intersubjectivity) rheumatics talk to rheumatics, asthmatics to asthmatics, migranoids to migranoids, dyspeptics to dyspeptics and so on. Indeed societies are formed precisely to foster this kind of communion, especially where the illness is something shameful or inhibiting. Thus we have 'Alcoholics Anonymous', 'Gamblers Anonymous', 'Depressives Associated' — a freemasonry of the psychologically rejected.